How not to improve the moral ecology of campus

Writing at the philosophy/politics blog Crooked Timber, philosopher John Holbo offers a critique of my arguments about the need for more viewpoint diversity on campus. Holbo believes that my arguments contain an internal logical contradiction, which he explains like this:

Haidt is highly bothered about two problems he sees with liberalism on campus – and in other environments in which lefties predominate….

1) An unbalanced moral ecology. Allegedly liberals have a thinner base of values, whereas conservatives have a broader one. Everyone, liberal and conservative alike, is ok with care/no harm/liberty – although liberals are stronger on these. Conservatives are much stronger on the loyalty/authority/purity axis, since allegedly liberals are weak-to-negligible here…. So: not enough conservatives in liberal environments to ensure a flexible, broad base of values. How illiberal!

2) Political correctness. Haidt has a real bug in his ear about this one.

The logic problem is this. If 2) is a problem, 1) is necessarily solved. And if solving 2) is important, then the proposed solution to 1) is wrong (or at least no reason has been given to suppose it is right).

Holbo’s claim is that if PC is really a problem, then that necessarily means that universities are full of people who are…

“shooting through the roof along the loyalty/authority/purity axis. Because that’s what PC is. An authoritarian insistence on ‘safe spaces’ and language policing, trigger warnings and other stuff.”

But if campuses are truly full of left-wing authoritarians (he says), then there’s no imbalance in the moral ecology, because all of the moral foundations are represented.

But there’s a big problem with Holbo’s argument. I don’t say that the problem on campus is that there’s an absence of one or more foundations. I say, over and over again, that the decline in political diversity has led to a loss of institutionalized disconfirmation. This was our argument in the BBS essay on political diversity that got me started down this road, and which documented the rapid political purification of psychology since the 1990s.

Welcome to our site. We are professors who want to improve our academic disciplines. Many of us have written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” It’s what happens when the great majority of people in a field think the same way on important issues that are not really settled matters of fact. We don’t want viewpoint diversity on whether the Earth is round versus flat. But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history? Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?

Science is among humankind’s most successful institutions not because scientists are so rational and open minded but because scholarly institutions work to counteract the errors and flaws of what are, after all, normal cognitively challenged human beings. We academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs. But as long as we can all count on the peer review process and a vigorous post-publication peer debate process, we can rest assured that most obvious errors and biases will get called out. Researchers who have different values, political identities, and intellectual presuppositions and who disagree with published findings will run other studies, obtain opposing results, and the field will gradually sort out the truth.

Unless there is nobody out there who thinks differently. Or unless the few such people shrink from speaking up because they expect anger in response, even ostracism. That is what sometimes happens when orthodox beliefs and “sacred” values are challenged.

Our concern at Heterodox Academy is very simple. It was expressed perfectly in 1859 by John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.

Holbo seems to think that if you were to start with a campus faculty entirely composed of non-authoritarian progressives (people like Nick Kristof or Barack Obama, who praise the importance of dissent), and then you added in some authoritarian progressives, who punish dissent on their most sacred issues, you would improve the campus ecology. Well, Holbo is right that you’d be adding a kind of diversity, but it’s one that is often hostile to other viewpoints. Mill and I and the rest of Heterodox Academy think it would be better to expose students—and professors—to people who hold views across the political spectrum, especially if you can do it within an institution that fosters a sense of community and norms of civility. We don’t care about balance. We don’t need every view to be represented. We just want to break up orthodoxy. Is that illogical?

10 Comments

“Holbo seems to think that if you were to start with a campus faculty entirely composed of non-authoritarian progressives (people like Nick Kristof or Barack Obama, who praise the importance of dissent), and then you added in some authoritarian progressives, who punish dissent on their most sacred issues, you would improve the campus ecology.”

That much is misreading of my post. (Perhaps it was unclear.) My point was that your argument implies this. The implication – if it is one – is obviously absurd, therefore there must be something wrong with your argument if it implies this. I’m sure you wish to say you are not on the hook for this bad argument. We can have that out separately. But, at the very least, I am not advocating the absurd thing. I am warning against it.

I have a simple question, if it has a simple answer: I take your moral foundations work to be, for you, linked to the-lack-of-diversity work. My point was there’s a simple logic problem here. You deny the logic problem. Very well. But do you deny the linkage categorically? You are in no way, shape or form arguing that broad foundations, value-wise, go with healthy diversity, value-wise? It seems to me that in some of your talks – and certainly in The Righteous Mind, you do that.

“Haidt is highly bothered about two problems he sees with liberalism on campus – and in other environments in which lefties predominate….

1) An unbalanced moral ecology. Allegedly liberals have a thinner base of values, whereas conservatives have a broader one. Everyone, liberal and conservative alike, is ok with care/no harm/liberty – although liberals are stronger on these. Conservatives are much stronger on the loyalty/authority/purity axis, since allegedly liberals are weak-to-negligible here…. So: not enough conservatives in liberal environments to ensure a flexible, broad base of values. How illiberal!

2) Political correctness. Haidt has a real bug in his ear about this one.

The logic problem is this. If 2) is a problem, 1) is necessarily solved. And if solving 2) is important, then the proposed solution to 1) is wrong (or at least no reason has been given to suppose it is right).”

I am not so sure you understand logic. That’s a rhetoric problem, not logical.

How is it, for example, that “if 2) is a problem, 1) is necessarily solved”? How is there any correlation there? If political correctness is a problem, how is that at ALL correlated with there being a lack of conservatives in the liberal environment?

“If solving 2) is important, then the proposed solution to 1) is wrong”. How? Clearly, the proposed solution to 1) is to increase the voice of varying levels of conservative opinion.

Now we all know there are still conservatives on campuses, many of whom do not speak for fear of retaliation (the consequence of not solving 2), if you will). And before I continue, it should be clear that what is meant by “liberal” and “conservative” in this context is in the modern understanding of both terms, both sides of which are offshoots of classical liberalism (I.E., liberal and conservative do not even remotely mean today, what they did before).

I see no justification whatsoever for your stance, or any proof of correlating causality in your “logic problem”.

Maybe it is just unclear, would you mind dumbing it down for my simple, uneducated mind?

“The logic problem is this. If 2) is a problem, 1) is necessarily solved. And if solving 2) is important, then the proposed solution to 1) is wrong (or at least no reason has been given to suppose it is right).”

I am not so sure you understand logic. That’s a rhetoric problem, not logical.”

I think you’ve misunderstood. The quoted bit is not the argument itself. It’s a schema for the argument, giving the form of it. To get the actual argument you have to click through to the post.

If you’ve read the post and still not understood, think of this analogy. Suppose you have two problems: the sink is broken so you can’t turn on the tap. The shower is busted so the water can’t be turned off. Well, at least the ‘can’t get water’ problem can’t be real. Logically, you can’t have too little and too much water at the same time.

Your response to Haidt’s response to your first confused claim is still confused.

Your first argument supposed that the only sort of diversity that matters for the heterodox academy case is at the level of MFT. Haidt corrected you on this. Instead of graciously admitting that the normative reasons to value diversity do not have to logically flow into and/or from MFT and apologizing for your sloppy reading of these separate issues, you half acknowledge your error and proceed to double down on what motivated your original error. Now, you’ve slid the other way and point to passages where Haidt has advocated for diversity as measured by MFT, as if caring about other sorts of diversity on Millian grounds rules out caring about diversity along the dimensions measured by MFT.

Your second effort is every bit as wrong as your first error, and both mistakes come from a single error connected to a real insight—you rightly note that pussyhats and authoritarian expressions of PC on campus are (plausibly interpreted as) expressions of sacred values, but you somehow conjure the conclusion that this contradicts something in Haidt’s analysis. It does not. In both cases, your error comes from transforming claims about more-or-less along many dimensions into categorical claims along a single dimension. This is an error we philosophers are prone to make, but it is to our embarrassment. I blush for you.

To say that “conservatives” favor all six foundations while “liberals” favor just three is not to say “liberals” have no sacred values! Note, the scare quotes are an intentional signal of my disdain for the boiling down of diverse individuals into these broad conventional categories, especially by these historically misleading and perpetually contested terms. This is at the root of your error. “Left” vs. “Right” is little better. There is more than one dimension to the diversity of political opinion. When anyone goes on with “liberals be all like this, and conservatives be all like that,” the only charitable reading is that it’s like a comedy sketch about men and women—it’s not to be taken very seriously, even if there’s something to it. To be sure, it’s not really about all men and all women. This reading is not consistent with looking for logical errors, unless one is faced with some categorical conclusion. Haidt derives no such categorical conclusion. That some subset of “liberals” has come to be as obnoxious as the worst sorts of “conservatives” is perfectly plausible, and denouncing obnoxiousness all around is perfectly consistent with advocating for greater diversity. MFT does not suppose the expression of sacred values must be obnoxious and intolerant.

“Liberal” and “conservative” are not static categories but loose clusters on a scatterplot of dancing individual dots. There is great diversity along every dimension of MFT even among “liberals,” and there are more dimensions to diversity than MFT! To observe that there is some amount of diversity amongst “liberals” (some are wearing sacred pussyhats! some are authoritarian!) in no way shows or even indicates the slightest evidence that there are already present all the kinds of diversity we should care about at the university. It’s a terrible bit of sophistry to accuse Haidt of a logical error in all this, when you’re the one who has taken statistical generalities carved from broad conventional categories (mostly artifacts of mere historic-political accident) and made them into crisp Platonic categories that will bear the weight of accusing others of logical error.

In short, there are diverse sorts of diversity, diversely distributed in measurable but vague ways, and some of these matter more than others in a given circumstance. A group of 3 scholars with identical scores on MFT measures might very well consist of a liberal, a communitarian, and a theocrat. Another group might be all liberals with very different scores on MFT measures. Nothing in MFT makes these impossible groups; it is perfectly consistent with there being statistically measurable likelihoods for a random sample to cluster a particular way while we have certain groups not like the statistical likely groups. I’m guessing I would get different scores on the MFT from folks at a Unitarian Universalist event than I would get at some meeting of Bernie Bros. Let the categories be “liberal” and “conservative” instead of liberal, communitarian, theocrat, etc., and things are even more messy. To be clear, both groups could stand to become more diverse, if diversity matters for reasons made familiar by Mill (and I would hasten to add Milton, Popper, Madison, Darwin, Hayek, Pericles, Huxley, and others—note the diversity even about diversity!)

If “liberals” become as diverse as “conservatives” in terms of drawing from a more diverse set of moral foundations, they are still less diverse as a group than such a group that also included “conservatives.” If they are not as diverse in terms of MFT as well, they are less diverse still. There’s no tension in advocating both kinds of diversity (and still others!) if we think confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, perspectival narrowness, and the corrupting influence of absolute power are among the legitimate concerns of a flourishing culture.

Finally, a diversity of expressions of sacredness and authority is better than having one style of these allowed, but it is still a dangerous thing. No one is advocating bringing in “conservative” voices so they can beat up or shout down “liberal” voices. Both sides will have to embrace a liberal tolerance if they want to participate in our conversation. (Note the lack of scare quotes there.)

There is a value difference over animal rights vs animal property. But in the fields of medicine, psychology, biology – especially in the research subfields that blend with and serve factory farming and animal experimentation industries – the animal exploitation view has total and complete hegemony. Animal rights arguments are gatekept out. The ideological hegemony is much stronger than that in other areas which Haidt spend so much time and energy writing about.

I’m not a philosopher/not a psychologist but like viewpoint diversity and have enjoyed part 1 (so far) of this Crooked Timber discussion (gah! those are a lot of comments!). Holbo and his buds seem like nice-enough (and sometimes funny) guys, though mostly dudes, for sure. Which is to say that this whole thing brings to mind a story:
Last yr I attended a talk by bestselling author X. I had not yet read his book and was a bit surprised to hear some straight-out-of-Haidt ideas. After the talk, I stood in line w/ my friend so she could get her copy of book signed. When it was our turn:
Me: “So, that idea you expressed is straight from Haidt.”
X: “Oh, yeah. I’ve read Z [cites one source]. I should look into more of his work/talks.”
Me: “Well, this and this and that are interesting–if you are going to look.”
X: [pausing] “You know…Jon and I went to college together and there’s one thing I will never forget about him.”
Me: [super curious]: Oh?
X: “Yeah. He dated the hottest girl on campus. I mean the. hottest. girl. That used to kill us. I’ll never forget that. The. hottest. girl.” [shakes head and returns to book signing]

For the record, I thought this exchange was completely hilarious and telling because I’ve already decided that most intellectual/academic posturing is just a strategy in the quest to score the hottest girl. I mean, not exactly, and I’m kinda kidding, but also not kidding. Anyway, that’s the lens through which I’ve chosen to understand this current online debate.

This theme is really hard. I was writing an essay about moral qualities of young peoples for https://hitthegrade.com/ and I realized how serious this theme is. I think a lot of moral education depends on the society: parents, preschool, teachers at school and college. Everyone should teach not just mathematics or history, but also moral rights of peoples,